


torch-light red on sweaty faces

by spellingmynamewrong



Series: the masked marauders [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, M/M, Pre-Slash, This is super self-indulgent, sirius dresses in leather and that's all you really need to know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:09:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24879751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spellingmynamewrong/pseuds/spellingmynamewrong
Summary: Remus might have grown up on comic books and Marvel movies, but he knows, after two years of actually doing the things he once watched the Flash and Spider-Man do on screens, that real life doesn’t usually have happy endings for vigilantes, especially vigilantes with less than thirty pounds in their wallet on a good day.Or, Remus is a superhero. Sirius barges in, as he usually does, and changes things.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: the masked marauders [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1800262
Comments: 11
Kudos: 40





	torch-light red on sweaty faces

**Author's Note:**

> this is my attempt to get rid of writer’s block. this will probably be a series of short drabbles? i have a lot of feelings about the marauders as superheroes that i need to Express. also, this is for the future—no one dies. well, none of our main characters die. also, still figuring out superhero origin stories and all that jazz—leave suggestions in the comments! also, the title is from t.s. eliot’s “the waste land.”

There is what he is supposed to be, and there is what he is. 

When newcomers to London learn of The Wolf, they expect flash and bang. Brutality. Something vicious, something that goes bump in the night, something out of a cautionary fairy tale.

He’s none of that, really. (Can’t be that, is terrified of becoming that, not when he’s seen broken bodies in dark alleyways and felt bile rise up in the back of his throat. Not when he knows, too intimately, what it feels like to be helpless himself.) What no one realizes is that wolves are good at _tracking_. He never loses a trail, always finds the criminal-of-the-night in the nick of time. (There’s also the super-strength thing, but he doesn’t like to use that unless he has to.)

Of course, he supposes most people wouldn’t realize who he actually is behind the mask either. He has an inkling of what they suspect—someone tall and strong, London’s own Captain America (Captain Britain?), someone handsome with girls swooning at his feet. Someone who was probably in the army, once, or is some impossible billionaire who’s too weird to pick up a regular hobby like baking. 

Remus may be tall, but he doesn’t think anyone in their right mind has ever thought of him as handsome, what with the scars he’s accumulated over the years and the perpetual dark circles under his eyes. He wonders what supervillains would think if they learned he was Remus Lupin, twenty, UCL Chemistry student who’s struggling to make rent on his flat _again_ , because every time he gets a roommate that seems remotely normal they turn out to be a serial killer or something. Technically, Frank hadn’t done anything wrong—he’d just gotten engaged to his long-term girlfriend and decided that they _had_ to get a new place now. He can’t really blame him, but at the same time, he’d like to go a _month_ without needing to put up ads again. 

He shakes himself out of his thoughts and sighs from his perch upon a rooftop. The West End is quiet on this warm June night. Well, as warm as London ever gets. There are no stars, because there never are, but he searches anyway, thinking of his parents back in Wales. Back at home. There will be stars there, he’s sure. Stars, blinking brightly in the sky, each one telling a story of their own. 

“Hi,” and Remus whirls around, because _what the fuck_ , how is there anyone else on the rooftop right now, and _oh_. 

Staring straight at him with a broad smile is a man with dark hair and sparkling eyes, dressed from head to toe in, of all things, _leather_. He looks like Catwoman but somehow hotter, and Remus is a horrible person for creeping on a stranger like this, especially a stranger who might be here to murder him. 

“Who are you?” he asks once he’s gotten his brain to calm down—well, not completely, but a little. 

“Starboy,” the stranger—superhero?—random hot man?—grins. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Give me one reason not to punch you right now,” Remus says, because even hot strangers can be dangerous. He’s learned that the hard way.

“I’m here to help,” Starboy—and, okay, he knows he can’t say anything because he’s _The Wolf_ , but it’s not like he picked this name himself, some girl on Twitter just took a picture of him on a full moon and apparently he looked like a werewolf or something in it and the Internet just decided to name him, but who on Earth _voluntarily_ names themselves something as ridiculous as fucking _Starboy_ —says, putting his hands above him. “Friend, not foe.” 

“Sorry, not really taking on sidekick applications right now.” No matter how hot the sidekick could be. He knows what happened to Jason Todd. 

“I don’t do well enough with authority to be a sidekick anyway,” Starboy shrugs. “Look, I’ve been doing this for a while myself and I just moved here for uni, so I figured I’d keep doing it here, you know? And then I remembered that you were here too, and I was figuring if you needed any help, I could be that. It can’t be easy, handling this all by yourself.”

The logical thing to do is say no. Remus might have grown up on comic books and Marvel movies, but he knows, after two years of actually _doing_ the things he once watched the Flash and Spider-Man do on screens, that real life doesn’t usually have happy endings for vigilantes, especially vigilantes with less than thirty pounds in their wallet on a good day. He doesn’t want, doesn’t need, any more people getting involved. And having help—it could be more of a risk than an asset. No one knows that he sometimes falls asleep in lectures not because he stayed up too late trying to finish a difficult problem set but because he spent the night in some abandoned warehouse out of a horror game, trying to convince some twisted supervillain to not shoot yet _another_ scientist they’ve kidnapped (and sometimes Remus wonders if he should switch his course from chemistry to history or something, if this is the future that awaits him). And if no one knowing means that he could die, one day, and Remus Lupin would be gone as well, Remus who works at Costa Coffee Monday through Thursday and spends his Friday afternoons in the lab, and no one would even know why he was gone—well. He tries not to think about that too much. 

“Do you even have powers?” he settles for instead.

Starboy nods, and then—he’s gone.

“Hi,” Starboy says, and what the _fuck_ , he’s somehow on the rooftop of another building. 

“You can teleport?”

“Nah, nothing as cool or convenient as that,” Starboy says. “Super-speed is what you’d call it, I think?”

“You’re the Flash,” Remus says flatly. (Also, how does Starboy even _run_ in all that leather? Does he have to run? Is having super-speed more like sprinting or teleporting?)

“No, I’m Starboy.”

“No, I know that, I meant—”

“I know what you meant, I was joking,” Starboy laughs. “Sort of, I suppose, though I really haven’t watched that show in a while.”

“Why haven’t you appeared before now?”

“Wow, you have a lot of questions. I’m here for uni, like I said before. Took a gap year, did some superheroing around Europe, now I’m here,” Starboy says. “Decided to do something with my life during the daytime besides cavorting across the continent.”

“Oh. Wait, how did you find me?”

“Honestly? I wasn’t planning to,” and that’s a bit of a relief, since Remus isn’t really up for another crazed-stalker-cum-supervillain, not after what happened in December. “I was just going around London, searching for crime and all that jazz, and I saw someone on a rooftop. I, uh, thought they might be in danger, so I decided to stop by, and then I realized it was you. And I remembered what happened, a few months back, and I figured I’d offer a hand.”

“I’m not going to tell you who I am,” Remus says. 

“Wasn’t planning on asking. Also, I’m not going to tell you who I am either.”

“And if one of us is ever in danger—save the civilians first. Get the people who didn’t do anything wrong out of the way.”

“Of course.”

“And it’s—this isn’t going to be a thing. We’re not the Avengers or Fantastic Four or Justice League. It’s—an arrangement. I’ll help you out when you need it, you’ll help me out when I do.”

“Sure,” Starboy says. “Also, I don’t think we have enough people to even be the Fantastic Four, unless you’re secretly three toddlers in a trench coat or something.”

“That doesn’t make sense. I’m not even wearing a trench coat.”

Starboy shrugs. “Anyway, you’re down?”

“Arrangement, not—partnership or anything.”

“Heard you the first time.” And Starboy, this ridiculous leather-clad superhero, _shakes his hand_ , and then grins again. 

Remus is probably making an _enormous_ mistake.

**Author's Note:**

> i had fun writing this! i have a lot of Ideas about where to go from here, but i’m also Very Open to suggestions given that a lot of these ideas are dumb things like “sirius named himself starboy not because of the obvious reason but because he read _stargirl_ by jerry spinelli once and when someone he rescued asked him what his name was that book was the only thing that popped into his head.”


End file.
